No current gen Radeon, GeForce GPUs are in the top popular 5 months after launch

UL Benchmarks listed the best graphics card for January 2019 and reflects how badly adopted the currently-gen graphics are. The list reflects AMD RX Vega or Nvidia RTX series not adopted by PC gamers and enthusiasts. The GTX 10 series’s popularity dominates most of the top 5 and top 10. AMD’s only entry is with the RX 580 being on the 5th and has VEGA 64 on the 7th rank.

About UL Benchmarks and 3DMark

This UL Benchmark lists popular GPUs that were benchmarked by its users. Therefore it ranks its popularity based on user benchmark submissions. This list will include both reference and non-reference, base clock, factory clocked or manually overclocked graphics cards. 3DMark is a GPU-based benchmark widely used by many types of users over the years.

This chart reflects how good previous generation graphics cards are for currently available games. It also shows both the manufacturer’s failure to resonate with its consumers.

What needs to be done…

Realistic pricing, transparency in promotions, easily adoption and cost-effective technologies and games that utilize feature sets at the time of launch is important. A series of RTX and DLSS titles were never launched with the GPU release, giving no merit to early adopters. Transparency helps to establish realistic pricing for a product. It also needs to stop exploiting a very stifled community enough to push them towards gaming consoles. At the end of the day, people pay for GPUs to play games on the PC. A graphics card is not an end product, rather the main component to play games. If seen only as a technical POV, HBM2 looks promising on paper and DirectX Ray Tracing in real-time gaming was inevitable. But the pros end there.

The story with Nvidia…

The RTX graphics cards were launched on September 20th, 2018 with the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti via its ‘Be for the game’ marketing campaign. Despite overhyped marketing for the RTX and DLSS, we didn’t see a plethora of games to justify the premium over the GTX 10 series at the time of launch and even till date. RTX 2080 was being heavily criticized for not providing value for its price, while RTX 2080 Ti gets the benefit of the doubt since its the highest possible high-end performer. RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 was more accepted due to the pricing and value over its GTX 10 series counterparts as a new purchase. Nvidia did a lot of screw-ups since, such as artificially creating lack of GTX cards during the peak of cryptocurrency mining. As of now, there is also a class-action lawsuit filed by its shareholders.

The story with AMD Radeon…

As of now, the story with AMD isn’t very different. The RX Vega 56 and 64 came with a lot of ‘for the 99%’ hype. While the models did compete with GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, the lack of HBM2 supplies, price gouging and higher power consumption compared to its direct competitions was what pulled it down. The RX Vega series cannot be compared with the RTX series because of its DXR (dubbed as RTX by Nvidia) and DLSS implementations. AMD did not get into the DirectX RayTracing and DLSS type… yet.

Radeon VII and GTX 11 would show a new leaf?

AMD is planning to release Radeon VII which is based in Vega 2 architecture. There is a benchmark leak in UL Benchmarks for 3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Ultra, two of 3DMark Benchmarks are based on 1080p and 4K testing. Eventually, we’ll have to see what AMD does with Navi architecture. It looks AMD plans to pit its Radeon VII against RTX 2080, which Nvidia’s CEO went rather salty with it. Both AMD and NVIDIA should be more concerned about getting more developers to make games exclusively for its PC platform. It is a duopoly market and assuming if both make good cards together, both will mutually benefit from this practice. Similarly, it also needs to push indie developer titles, even if it doesn’t rely on current or upcoming generation graphics card to run.

Disclosure

We did not get any RTX and VEGA graphics cards due to its management’s indirect ‘read-between-the-lines’ mannerisms. I do have a suspicion that one of them strongarmed our supply and communication from a non-reference manufacturer. We did get India-specific newsletters from a regional sales manager that pushed its PR narrative from via some sites in India and another known to be a paid promoter. There are those who provide such narratives needed by people simply to make a colourful report for internal purposes. Eventually, they disconnect away from its customers and paint the opposite of reality. Hardware BBQ does not shy away from pinpointing such narratives and inconsistencies. We don’t do on-the-spot ‘reviews’ at a drop of a hat on a system set up by the companies against its competitor’s product placed next to it. If the tables were turned, you wouldn’t like it, either. We hold our respect towards the site’s readers. They trust us and there use our affiliation links and come back to read more. We hope the chip makers do the same. One can’t be “for the 99%” or “be for the game” if their motivation is otherwise.

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